Melchur wrote:
Apart from Fargoth, I haven't seen one NPC in Morrowind who has ever sneaked. I often play characters who sneak up their enemies and deal critical damage. It is always like that that the NPC's or creatures are the victim. They just stand around and wait to be slayed by me.

Now, assuming some baddy out there has a decent sneak skill and has got aware of the player. Wouldn't it be cool to have this NPC sneak up and only start combat as soon as you are in reach of his/her weapon or you face him/her. As far as I know the mw-scripting language can test if something is within the view of an actor, so the components for this mechanism should be in place anyway.

Although Morrowind does not do this itself, this could imo work well as a feature for 1.0. It would just be nice to have slightly smarter NPC's. People would be a lot more interested in trying out OpenMW.

Star-Demon wrote:
1.0 doesn't have extra features, it has the original ones.

Of course, the AI in Morrowind wasn't that stable to begin with, so Maybe an embellishment is in order when we have NPCs ready to take behavior?

And yes, I think better AI packages would be a better thing to have. Best of all, in OpenMW these things would be accessible to users to change.

sir_herrbatka wrote:
It would be cool to see predators sneaking up to pray, but this is really far from now.

gnomesrule19 wrote:
There are NPC's who will use sneak and chameleon in MCA. Though the scripting by which this is done is less friendly than an improvement upon AI in general.

jhooks1 wrote:
There is one problem with this, sneaking makes it so the AI has a harder time detecting you. I think having another npc sneak wouldn't hide them at all, they would just be in the sneak animation.
You could make it so when an npc is sneak they appear and disappear in intervals, making them harder to see.

gnomesrule19 wrote:
True. Though a chameleon effect will make an enemy more difficult to detect (though the combat music would give some of it away), and, if possible it would be adequate if they were able to make critical hits while using the sneak animation at least giving them an advantage of sorts.

Melchur wrote:

[...]I think having another npc sneak wouldn't hide them at all, they would just be in the sneak animation.

My idea was to make the program continuously check if the sneaking NPC either is on your screen or has reached you. Only if one of those conditions are met, he/she will start combat.

As long as those conditions are not met the NPC will only move sneaking towards the player.

When the NPC has started combat he/she will act like any other fighting NPC.

Star-Demon wrote:

Melchur wrote:

[...]I think having another npc sneak wouldn't hide them at all, they would just be in the sneak animation.

My idea was to make the program continuously check if the sneaking NPC either is on your screen or has reached you. Only if one of those conditions are met, he/she will start combat.

As long as those conditions are not met the NPC will only move sneaking towards the player.

When the NPC has started combat he/she will act like any other fighting NPC.

It would be better if you just compare two actor's vectors and see if they intersect. The rest might be too much to calculate.